


Das Raubtier - The Predator

by Darth_Cannizard



Category: Joyeux Noël | Merry Christmas (2005)
Genre: Blood Drinking, Blood and Gore, Blood and Injury, Horstebert, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Stockholm Syndrome, Vampire AU, Whump, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:20:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27903619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darth_Cannizard/pseuds/Darth_Cannizard
Summary: “Which one of them do you want next?” he is asked."I want the officer," he replies. “This - Audebert. I met him briefly in December 1914. A handsome and brave man. His blood smells utterly delicious. "“That's how it shall be then,” is the answer.
Relationships: Lt Audebert/Lt Horstmayer (Joyeux Noël)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	Das Raubtier - The Predator

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Red Lips Are Not So Red, As The Stained Stones Kissed By The Dead](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22309870) by [Darth_Cannizard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darth_Cannizard/pseuds/Darth_Cannizard). 



"Someone is decimating our people," says his second-in-command Lefevre the very moment they start their first conversation after Audebert has returned to the front with what is left of his company. It is summer of 1915 and the war is in full swing. They were merged with another part of the 26th, who also had to go back to the front after a defeat. Camille is still the highest ranking officer, but his direct subordinate is now the slick Major Lefevre.  
  
"What does “decimated” mean here? We are at war, of course it can happen that we are killed one by one."

Lefevre hesitates to answer and Camille sees that he is trying not to roll his eyes. This is not particularly well received if you make yourself unpopular with your commander immediately after the greeting by suggesting that he is intellectually underprivileged.  
  
"Individually decimated," he says, emphasizing the first word, "they disappear at night and appear as corpses in no man's land on the next day."

"Then the Germans will probably have a sniper," and that is the end of the conversation for Audebert. He is about to turn away, but Lefevre won't let up. “You don't see bullets wounds or anything resulting from the use of a bayonet or a knife. They all have an expression of deep horror on their faces and sometimes no visible wounds at all. Or something like if they were bitten by an animal, either on the neck, then again on the wrists ... ” He leaves the statement unfinished.  
  
"How many people have we lost in this way?"

“Still too few to make the Headquarters react to this. It's not like someone disappears every night, mon lieutenant. There are usually several weeks between the individual events. And whatever it is, it doesn't focus on this front section alone. But the strange thing is, the focus is on our people. There are reports from our english allies that something similar is happening to them. But we haven't heard about anything like this happening to the Germans.” Lefevre looks at him while Audebert thinks it over.  
  
"Well, I suggest that our men will now move in pairs. We let them form pairs and even if they have to go to the latrine ...” Lefevre wrinkles his nose, but he nods. The idea makes sense to him." Ponchel is my partner then," says Audebert, and this is for him the actual end of this conversation  
  
Until the next dead soldier appears.

Thus one of the pair is dead, the other is picked up by medics because he has clearly gone insane. Before Camille can do anything, Christmas has literally broken over them and the german tenor Sprink leaves his trench against all reason and contradictiong everything they fight for, singing against war and hate. And then nothing is as it was before.

There is a rumor that is making the rounds in the French Army: A being that is not a human, powerful and wise, is on the side of the Germans. A being to whom human sacrifices are made to appease it. _What a ridiculous superstition_ , thinks Audebert.

*

They leave their trenches, exchange gifts, show each other the photos of their loved ones, celebrate the Holy Mass together. The next day they bury their dead and play football together.  
  
That first night, in addition to the officer in charge, Oberleutnant König, another officer is present. Audebert and Gordon are told he is here for a visit. He is someone very important, although nothing on his uniform indicates a rank. _A strange man_ , Audebert thinks later. _Much too handsome. With a somehow strange rigidity of facial features and movements, and then again showing a quickness of reaction that is terrifying. A dangerous person. Even his own people seem to be afraid of him. And why do I keep catching him looking at me?_

**

“Which one of them do you want next?” he is asked.  
  
  
  


The Pact that was made with him includes a certain degree of freedom to hunt as he wishes to. As long as it is not his own people, but French or English, he can do anything he desires. Or he is assigned prisoners of war. He was assured that as long as he and the Kaiserreich exist, he will be free to do what he wants. His acts, whatever they may be, will not be persecuted. He will enjoy immunity in his own country and any kind of support he needs.

They want to benefit from his experience. From watching all the wars he's been through and that's quite a lot of them. The fact that he is fast, strong and able to read minds are just a few of the skills the German Reich is interested in, but above all his memories are of great value.  
  
  
  


"I want the officer," he replies. “This - Audebert. I met him briefly in December 1914. A handsome and brave man. His blood smells utterly delicious. "  
  


That's how it shall be then,” is the answer.

**

He stands in the middle of this empty and vacant room. _This is a hospital_ , thinks Camille, _why is this allowed to happen here?_  
  
His jacket was taken off before he was pushed into the room so that he is standing there in his white shirt. With his left hand he tries to hold the wound on his neck that was inflicted on him. That the predator in human form inflicted on him when it kept drinking from him again and again. Audebert sways on his feet and grows weaker and weaker, his white shirt bloodstained. He can hardly keep the wound closed with his hand, he's so weak.  
  
"Finish it," he says in a whisper, unable to suppress a wet cough as he chokes on his own blood.

The German slowly approaches him.

  
  
“I don't want to end it, I want to keep you and drink from you again and again. Your blood is delicious, it sings to me, it would be a waste to kill you.” His French is absolutely perfect, if a little antiquated.  
  
"No, no, I don't want to have to endure this any longer, end it **now** ," says Camille desperately. "Here, you want that so badly," and comes closer to the vampire after he has taken his hand off the wound. Horstmayer's nostrils widen and his eyes become redder and less brown. Audebert feels his searching hand on his hip. "No," he says, "I don't want to kill you, beautiful and fearless as you are," putting his right hand on Camille’s wound to cover it. And in the middle of his incipient faint, Camille feels how he is gently lifted up under his knees.

**

He wakes up and before he opens his eyes, the first thing he notices is that there are a lot of people around him. He is apparently in one of the huge halls of the German hospital. The bed he is laying in is clean, his neck wound has been carefully bandaged, and he is no longer in pain. But it’s clear he is a prisoner when he gets up for the first time two weeks later. He had only seen his mysterious tormentor briefly during this time, when he was standing at the other side of the room and exchanging a few words with the senior doctor, but as soon as Camille got up, the soldier leaning against the far wall with a good view of his bed was moving too, guarding his every movement with watchful eyes.  
  
Audebert cannot escape, he is too weak for that. He dreams of being free again, but most of the time he only has nightmares and they have only one content: a predator with long fangs hunting him and then hurting him again and again in the most terrible of ways.

As he finds out in retrospect, his martyrdom is far from being over.  
  
His neck wound had barely started to close, when the senior doctor asks him to get dressed and come with him one evening.

“Do you know what he is? Do you know what he's going to do to me? Where's your goddamn hypocratic oath ?! ”Audebert asks him with desperation.

"Everything in this life has a price and that is what we have to pay to get from him what we need for our empire to be victorious."  
  
The French is not able to reply anything to this.

*

They are in the **vacant room** again, that’s how Audebert started to call it. _He_ goes down on one knee in front of him, and takes both of his hands in his, brown eyes, the pupils red rimmed, look at him from below. First the right hand, then the left and in the time between tearing into him with the long fangs and drinking, Audebert has started to sob. The monster slashed both of his wrists so deeply that Audebert believes to see the bones in his hand. The blood just gushes out and with this rapidity of bleeding there is not much time left for him.

"It's a shame it always ends so quickly," mumbles his executioner licking his bloody lips. That is the last thing Audebert sees before he passes out. He dreams of huge forests and lush green meadows. He is happy and liberated as he has not been for a long time.

And then he wakes up and the reality is harsh and cruel.

The same huge room, the same bed, the same senior physician, the same soldier guarding him, the same nurses who jump over at every sigh he makes to help him and to fulfill his wishes. And this time this is sorely necessary because both of his hands are thickly bandaged. He cannot eat on his own, he cannot use the pot, he cannot even scratch his nose. These wounds cost him 4 weeks to heal and even afterwards he has difficulty moving his hands, they have become so powerless because the wounds that were inflicted were so deep. Even his attempt to take his own life with scissors ends in a failure because of his weak hands, which have become traitors in their powerlessness.

“Isn’t it that according to the Hague Convention, every prisoner of war has the right to get help from the Red Cross to contact his family?” he asks one day.  
  
The next day one of the nurses comes over and reads him a banally worded postcard that will be sent to his father and his bride. Sent in his name without him actualy writing even a single word on it. "I'm fine. I am treated well. Do not worry. With love, Camille R. Audebert”  
  
He starts laughing hysterically after the nurse has finished reading the text. "You will never be a free man again and you will never see your family," she says to him angry and a little snippy, and leaves. He doesn't even know if the Red Cross ever saw the card.

*

The next time he is picked up in the evening, he asks himself on the way what _he_ will do to him this time. But instead of a new cruelty and a new wound, they dine together. Every imaginable delicacy is served at a table placed in the middle of the empty room. A four course menu that would be admired even in the best of Parisian restaurants. Of course, _he_ doesn't eat, but watches Camille’s every movement.  
  
“I want to write a letter to my family,” says the Frenchman while spooning the soup that serves as a first course. "And I want to write this damn letter myself and not get it presented to me."

The blooddrinker nods after a while.

“What do I get in return?” he asks and smiles predatory, fangs exposed.

"Just choose a vein," says Audebert, "and I won't fight back."  
  
“Your resistance is what I like most. But if you swear to me on your honor as an officer, if you promise me, you will never try to harm yourself again, then you can write the letter tomorrow and I will hand it over to a messenger immediately."  
  
"You're going to kill me anyway, so why this sudden, touching worry about my well-being?"

"I'm the only one who has the right to shed your precious blood," the vampire hisses.  
  
“Well then, I swear to you, on my honor as a Lieutenant of the always victorious French Army. What is the second course?"  
  
When he is bitten in the crook of his arm after the dinner, it is done slowly and carefully. It is not much blood that he loses that evening and then he is carried bridal to his bed, the wound in his arm carefully tied with a cloth. Replete as he is, he falls asleep straight away.

*

In retrospect he is so grateful that before this battle, he had sent some of his best people, including Ponchel, into the hinterland, because he predicted a defeat for the French before the battle started. Apparently that is how he saved their lives.  
  
The remnants of his unit surrender to the overpowering enemy at some point during the battle. He will never forget what happened after that. He is tied up, his eyes are blindfolded and he is dragged away and while he is stumbling away, he hears the order: “It was all about the officer. Kill them all.” The screams of his people accompany him to this day in his worst nightmares.

*

He only has a vague idea about what a copulation between two men entails and how it works. He later wonders why he was even asked if he wanted to.

This time he had been lightly sedated before he was picked up that evening. To his amazement, there is now a bed in the empty room where the richly laid table previously stood. Had he not been so foggy he would probably have been horrified, but so he willingly allows the vampire, Karl, to carefully undress him and lay him down upon the bed. The room is very warm, thanks to the blazing fireplace at the back wall. “Have you done this before?” he is asked. "Not with a man," says Camille, arching up as his nipple is licked. This time it is the right thigh into which his lover, _his captor_ , sinks his long fangs several times to drink blood. The wounds are deep and when Horstmayer later penetrates him, using his blood as lubrication, his loins are copiously moistened with Camille's blood from the injured thigh. His thrusts are powerful and very deep. Camille’s tears are flowing freely while he is slowly deflowered with deep thrusts “Open your legs a little bit more and let me penetrate you deeper. That's right. Gods, you're so tight," as Camille's channel, not being used to penetration, gripped him even tighter. “It hurts,” says the Frenchman in a strained voice trying to push the German away, “not that deep, you’re hurting me.” His requests, however, remain unheard and at some point it doesn’t matter anymore – the pleasure he feels spiralling to highs he never would have thought possible. Although he is weakened from the loss of blood, his orgasm is more powerful than ever. Then the darkness takes him.

It is 2 days later when he regains consciousness. His right thigh is heavily bandaged and he feels a kind of a rolled up cloth inside his channel. He is told not to move too much and just not to try to get up. "Otherwise you will bleed the bed full again," says the senior physician and Audebert's face goes very red because this remark certainly doesn’t mean the wound on his thigh.

*

"You're the first one he didn't kill immediately," Doctor Winter later tells him as he changes his bandages.  
  
"How many were here before me?"  
  
"You don't want to know this."  
  
  
  


The visits to the **vacant room** have become less frequent. When they take place, it is only to eat together and talk about anything and everything. Karl started asking him for permission every time before gently lowering his fangs into him. And most of the time, drinking his blood turns into prolonged lovemaking. They also started talking because at some point the vampire began visiting him in the evenings. Carolus is his real name, he tells the French. Born and raised in a time when Germans and French were one nation and spoke one language. He often sits by Camille’s bed until just before the sun rises, in the warmth of the room and in the silence that comes at night. Except for the painful groans from the seriously wounded , it is usually quiet. Time seems to move slower when they whisper to each other. _How strange it is that I've got used to being here, not being free, being always available to quench his thirst_ , thinks Audebert. _And yet nobody has ever protected me as he does now. Nobody brought me presents, fulfilled my wishes, asked me how I feel. I have never been able to speak to anyone so openly. When did he stop being an enemy and tormentor? When did he become a lover and confidante? Am I now a traitor to France because I think so?_

*

"Let me go," says Camille one evening, "Beloved, let me be free again and fight for my country, visit my father, maybe get married and ..." he does not know which detail made the vampire so angry that he brutally grabbed him, then dragged him into the empty room and threw him down on the floor. The long fangs deep in his throat, his tormentor's cock in his channel, brutal thrusts, his bloodsmeared inner thights, the pool of blood below him. _This time he's going to kill me,_ Audebert thought as the vampire, in a mindless haze to hurt and punish him, opened his wrists and slashed both of his thights, but that thought was free from fear, but rather filled with sadness.  
  
It takes him a long time to wake up and in the first few days he is so numb with painkillers and so emotionally hurt that he cannot think clearly. Horstmayer visits him 2 weeks later. He sits down on the chair standing at Camille’s bed and is silent for a long time before finally looking him in the eyes. “You will be a free man again when you feel a little better and you are moveable. There’s soon to be an exchange of higher-ranking prisoners of war and you will be one of them."

"Why? Why now so suddenly? Let me stay with you, I promise you I will never again speak of freedom or my family."  
  
“I've hurt you terribly in the past few months and I'll kill you if this continues and I don't want to do this. That's why I'm letting you go. Besides, listen to what you're saying! You have become my slave and you don't even notice it.”

He stands up slowly.

One last glance and then: "Farewell, Camille Audebert."

Later Camille doesn’t remember what happens next. Only that he fights desperately while they hold him down as he tries to stand up to follow the vampire. He screams, he shouts, he gets a fit, then starts to cry.

Then it’s deepest and darkest desperation and the influence of the sedation numbing his body and mind. Only his father’s influence saves him from being transferred to a hospital for lunatics.

*

After the exchange of prisoners and the long period of convalescence, Audebert returned to the front in early 1917. He quickly gained a reputation for being brave and utterly fearless, but the truth was that he was now indifferent to his life. He hoped to be killed in battle and to sink into the Great Oblivion so as not to have to think about _him_ anymore. About what they had together. What he had lost.  
  
To the great disappointment of his father and his beautiful bride, he broke off his engagement.

When the war ended in November 1918, Camille had been in the hospital for several weeks. Once again, his wish to die did not come true, instead he was promoted and showered with praise and medals. The injury he was last to receive on the battlefield almost cost him his legs. It was his inner will not to give up and his basic stubbornness, combined with the newly made decision to go on a search for _his vampire_ , leading to the fact that in the end he kept both of his legs and later learned to walk again.

  
The November Uprising in Germany and the general unrest after the war, meant that he was able to travel to his lover's country with some delay. In the years that followed, how often did he think he saw a movement in the dark out of the corner of his eye? How many times has he been disappointed? He followed rumors about eerie occurrences, legends, strange series of murders only to find nothing again and again. As if Carolus had ceased to exist.

In 1926 he is 42 years old and then, one evening, he found Karl again. Or rather, he was found and saved. Berlin in the 1920s is a dangerous place, especially when someone, as Camille does, is wandering alone at night through dark alleys and shady areas. It is here that he thinks he will find his lost lover, because these are the best hunting places for a predator in human form. Audebert is attacked and badly beaten up. He manages to shoot one of the attackers and ram the other one a knife into his heart, _he was good at hand-to-hand combat during the war,_ but there are too many of them. And his old injuries have never completely healed.  
  
He is lying on the ground and they stand over him and debate whether they should have some fun with him before finishing him off, because he just looks good and the French are known to be delicacies, when something, _someone_ , comes at them from the shadows. With unbelievable speed. A yelp and there is the sound of the villain's neck being broken and before he sinks to the ground, it's the turn of the next one. Camille can't really see the attacker because he's so fast. And now he knows he found _him_.

“First a little visit to the Charitè,” says Karl with a wicked grin, “and then we take a room at the Adlon. To have time to talk about old times.” His face becomes very serious. His red rimmed pupils looking down at Camille with adoration.  
  
“I missed you,” Audebert says very quietly. “I tried to die, because I missed you so much, instead of dying they made me a hero. I've been looking for you since the end of the war. I searched for you for 12 years, you bastard and just when I gave up, you just show up and ...” He can't go on talking because of the uncontrollable sobs shaking him.

“Forgive me, Beloved, forgive me everything, these 12 years, the cruelty that I did to you, the loneliness to which I exposed you. I did it to save you from me. I'll make it up to you. If you allow me to do that, I will never leave you again."  
  
It is much later, when they are in their hotel room, after they talked and before making love to each other that Audebert is showing Karl the extent of his previous injuries. Camille would not have thought it possible that a few drops of Karl’s blood could heal all of this. Afterwards he feels younger, stronger. The fact that he can suddenly hear conversations from a few streets away or hear thoughts from others, fills him with fear at first, but later with astonishment and gratitude. What gifts that are!  
  
For 3 years they travel together through the Orient and Occident. They visit the far America. Go to India and China.

And at some point Carolus asks him: “Would you like to come to me, Beloved? Do you want to stay with me forever?"  
  
Camille Rene Audebert is 45 years old when he is made a vampire not far from the long ago filled in and covered trenches, near the city of Lens, where they first met in December 1914.

They still travel a lot after that, but always return to Rue Vauvin, to where the family house of the Audebert’s is. That is their center of life and their anchor point. It is all the more terrible when they witness the Nazi occupation forces marching into Paris. After that there is only one way for them: they serve first the French and then the German Resistance. When the Americans decide to join the war, they contact the american government.  
  
At first the President does not believe a word they say.  
  
Afterwards they become his most valuable fighters.

***

Should you, dear reader, wander through the Louvre at night, look at the precious art of the past on a _Museumsnacht_ in Germany, stroll through the alleys of Prague, stay at the British Museum or the Ermitage in the evening, sit outside in a cafe in Florence on a warm summer’s night or you are in some another beautiful place of this world at night, then watch out and be careful, because you might see them walking past you, arm in arm, looking each other in the eyes and holding hands.

Both beautiful, both pale, pupils red rimmed.

Forever together.

Eternal lovers.


End file.
